SOURCE: Doran, Madeleine. “History and Tragedy: Italianate Tragedy of Intrigue.” In Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama, pp. 128-42. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1954.

[In the excerpt below, Doran discusses revenge in Elizabethan drama as an overarching “motive” rather than a “class” of tragedy.]

Besides tyranny, Seneca has another repeated theme in his tragedies, revenge incited by jealousy, and this is a theme which leads us into the second great class of English renaissance tragedy, the Italianate tragedies of intrigue centered about crimes of passion. The revenge theme furnished invaluable dramatic motivation to English dramatists; though they shifted its moral implications, they never let go of it as a dramatic device until the closing of the theaters.¹ They did not have to look to Seneca for it, of course, for it was often a component of narrative Mirror tragedies, it was familiar through their favorite, Ovid, it was a notorious feature of contemporary Italian mores, and it evidently had a good deal of vitality in their own turbulent lives. But that Seneca impressed them with its dramatic possibilities is clear enough from the early imitative tragedies like Gorboduc, The Misfortunes of Arthur, Locrine, and Titus Andronicus, and from the revengeful ghosts that continue to haunt the stage into the seventeenth century. Even in the most thoroughly Senecan of English plays, the imitation of the pattern of action is not close, as it is in continental Senecan tragedy, for Seneca was too narrow in plot, too static for English taste, which liked plenty of action as well as plenty of words. Nevertheless, Seneca furnished them with a motive for opposition and counter-action out of which exciting conflict might come.

Many Elizabethan tragedies apply this revenge motive, as Seneca does in Thyestes, to the favorite theme of ambition (e.g., the early academic tragedies, Locrine, True Tragedy of Richard III, Shakespeare's Richard III and Julius Caesar); and a few Jacobean tragedies do the same (e.g., Hamlet, Jonson's Sejanus and Catiline). But there is another longer-lived line of revenge play where the central themes are love and jealous hatred, as they are in Seneca's Medea, Agamemnon, Phaedra, and the two Hercules plays. With these revenge plays we may associate other plays of passionate crime and intrigue where revenge does not figure at all. I am not, that is, treating “revenge” as a class of tragedy, but as a motive which frequently operates in tragedy of two different sorts, the rise-and-fall tragedy of ambition, and the Italianate tragedy of intrigue. There is recognizable in the latter class a different line of tragic interest, with different emphasis. Professor Farnham makes The Spanish Tragedy the father of it.² A very early example is the Inns of Court drama of Gismond of Salerne (1567-68), later revised by Robert Wilmot, one of the original authors, as Tancred and Gismund (1591-92);³ but The Spanish Tragedy appears to have started the new fashion on the public stage.

The Spanish Tragedy is primarily a lively play of intrigue, psychologically motivated, in which there is a love affair (as well as the motive of ambition) and in which revenge within revenge cleverly managed furnishes exciting action. Among Elizabethan plays of its descent I should include Kyd's Soliman and Perseda, the early Hamlet, Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, Marston's Antonio's Revenge. The major Jacobean plays in this line are Shakespeare's Othello, Marston's Insatiate Countess and perhaps his Sophonisba, Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy and Atheist's Tragedy, Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy, Webster's White Devil and Duchess of Malfi, Middleton's Women Beware Women and Changeling; the major Caroline ones, Ford's Broken Heart and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Many lesser-known plays, besides, fall into this general class. There are many differences, obviously, among the plays in this list. Some, like Titus Andronicus, Sophonisba, and Hamlet, cross the lines of the other big class, the tragedy of power. (Bussy D' Ambois and the Revenge of Bussy, which I put into the other class, might likewise, for the same reason, have been included here.) Political intrigue is not absent from many of these tragedies, especially the earlier ones, yet it is usually only one among other motives, and the movement of the action is not the rise-and-fall pattern. Most of the tragedies in the list have love, lust, or jealousy as the motivating passion; but, though none of these passions is dominant, though present, in Hamlet or The Jew of Malta, both plays are clearly descendants of The Spanish Tragedy. Revenge figures in most of the plays, though not centrally in all. Nevertheless, all these plays belong in this same loosely conceived class because they are all tragedies of intrigue motivated by passion, they nearly all have a romantic interest, and when they achieve tragic irony it is of a different sort from that of the tragedy of ambition centered about the theme of power. One may, with large reservations, include even Romeo and Juliet, for though revenge does not figure centrally in it and though it does not issue in crime, it is at least a tragedy of love and intrigue quite unrelated to De casibus tragedy.

The type of story on which these plays are based is to be found in the Italian novelle, which were turned out in quantities in the Renaissance. Although the major collections are familiar names to everyone, it may be useful to set down here in one place the most important.⁴ The best-known rivals to the Decameron, still a perennial favorite, though not translated as a whole until 1620, were Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554) and G. B. Giraldi Cinthio's Ecatommithi (1565 etc.). For Englishmen who could not read Italian—and the number of traveled gentlemen who could must have been great—there was in French Boaistuau and Belleforest's much moralized version of Bandello, Les Histoires tragiques (1559 etc.). Marguerite of Navarre's popular Heptameron (1559) was less useful for tragedy. In English there were numerous collections—free translations, usually with considerable moralizing additions, of Italian tales or their French versions. The most important were William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566-67, 1575), from a variety of authors including Boccaccio, Bandello (both direct and through Boaistuau and Belleforest), Giraldi, and Marguerite of Navarre; Geoffrey Fenton's Certain Tragical Discourses (1567), from Belleforest; George Turberville's Tragical Tales (1587), in verse, chiefly from Boccaccio; George Whetstone's Rock of Regard (1576) and An Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), with some stories from Giraldi and others, with some invented; Barnaby Rich His Farewell to Military Profession (1581), with sources, when they can be found, in the usual Italians. There were, besides, lesser collections and single tales. Spanish authors likewise translated and imitated the Italian tales and produced collections of their own, the finest being Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares (1613); this added to the Italian and French novelle a rich source, on the whole more suitable for romance than for tragedy, to be drawn on by later Jacobean and Caroline dramatists.

Another source of the same type of story was in Italian tragedy. Although Italian poets leaned pretty heavily on Seneca and on Roman history for themes, some, like Giraldi, went to the novelle for more up-to-date stories. Seven of Giraldi's nine tragedies (published posthumously in Venice in 1583) are based on his own prose tales. Epitia, for instance, is based on his fifth novel of the eighth decade; the story, through Belleforest, reached Whetstone and ultimately Shakespeare, who dramatized it as Measure for Measure. There is a probability that Shakespeare knew the Italian tale and even play as well as both the narrative and dramatic versions of Whetstone.⁵ Another example is Luigi Groto's La Hadriana (1578), recognized as possibly influencing Romeo and Juliet through the medium of some intermediate English play. We are not very sure of the channels by which the Italian drama influenced the English. We know that Italian actors visited England; whether they acted anything but commedie dell'arte we do not know. But it is perhaps unlikely, since the tragedies and the commedie erudite were written for the academies and the courts. There is no reason, however, why some of the plays may not have been available in printed copies brought from Italy. Social and literary commerce with Italy was abundant, and animadversions against the influence, literary or moral, of Italian drama imply that it was widely known. Certainly, a number of English comedies are directly traceable to Italian originals. And many English plays, either tragedy or comedy, have features so like Italian plays that we are tempted to posit for their conception and design some immediate Italian source. On the whole, however, the evidence is more extensive and more convincing for comedy than for tragedy.⁶ About the novelle, at any rate, we can be sure enough.

Now the novelle are particularly suitable for dramatic plundering—for comedy, tragedy, or romance. Any reader of Boccaccio's tales knows that those centered around romantic adventure are told chiefly for their narrative point. Complication leads to some sort of neat unraveling, happy or unhappy. They have, besides, an air of verisimilitude; they are located at a particular place, often at a particular time, and the names appear to be those of real people. Bandello and Giraldi specialize in tales of passion fit for tragedy, with emphasis on violence and horror, Giraldi especially so. All these things make the novelle acceptable to English dramatists. It is easy to see, however, how tragedy based on these stories takes on a different color and tone from the tragedy of ambition, and how it sometimes slips away from even that broad conception of tragedy formulated by the grammarians. For one thing, social position ceases to be so essential to the irony. For another, an invented plot may serve as well as a true one. For still another, a romantic intrigue plot may by a clever turn be brought to a happy conclusion. Indeed, that is the inevitable direction of this sort of tragedy, as seen in the tragi-comedies and romances of the later Jacobean and Caroline dramatists. Even revenge comes no longer to insure an unhappy ending; compare Middleton and Rowley's Fair Quarrel and Webster's Devil's Law Case. A rather verbal, posturing “honor” is often satisfied with something considerably short of killing. But this is at the end of things.

Italianate intrigue tragedy was bloody enough in its heyday in the 90's and early 1600's. And it was, too, generally satisfying to the traditional definition of tragedy in that it dealt with the turbulent affairs of illustrious persons and ended in death. It was also, we must believe, capable of satisfying renaissance notions of classical principle. An illuminating instance of this is found in De Nores' Poetica. He is perhaps the most rigidly academic and the least imaginative of all the Italian Aristotelians. He is at once so sure of his correct classicism and actually so imperceptive that one can be certain his departures from classical intention are wholly unconscious; they are especially valuable, therefore, in revealing tastes of his time which he did not recognize but from which he could not escape. For each of the major literary forms, epic, tragedy, and comedy, he chooses a tale from Boccaccio and shows how it might be worked up according to Aristotelian principles. The story he takes for tragedy is the brutal story of Rossiglione and Guardastagno,⁷ two noble knights of Provence, in which Rossiglione, in revenge for his wife's infidelity with his friend, first waylays Guardastagno and murders him, then gives his heart, cooked and dressed as if it were the heart of a wild boar, to his wife to eat. When, after she has eaten it, he tells her what she has done, she kills herself by leaping from a window; he, fearing reprisals from her family, takes flight. This story, De Nores says, is suitable for tragedy by reason of the illustrious rank of the personages, the characters midway between good and bad, the reversal from happiness to unhappiness with peripety and recognition, the completeness and verisimilitude of the action, capable of arousing pity and fear and of being restricted to twenty-four hours—in other words, by reason of the terms of Aristotelian formula as typically understood in the Renaissance. The story misses, of course, the very essence of Greek tragedy, that is, its religious character, but is perfectly adapted for treatment in the best renaissance Senecan manner. Although De Nores talks nearly always of Greek rather than Senecan plays, it is clear from this choice of story and his suggestions for handling it that he perceives no difference. True that the tale does not surpass the revolting horror of many Greek myths: the story of the Thyestean banquet, for instance, or the story of Philomela and Procne. But Greek tragedy, except for some of Euripides (e.g., Bacchae, Hippolytus), rarely goes quite so far. Moreover, and this is the important thing, the horror in Greek tragedy has its origin in myth, not in casual brutal incident; the horror, therefore, is attended by the issues of divine purpose and human destiny that myth is concerned with. Seneca, to do him justice, is concerned with the same things; but in Seneca it is easier, because of his horrendous rhetoric and his emphasis on violence for its own sake, to miss the point. And De Nores appears to have missed it. There is nothing in his story but a horrible tale of revenge asking for treatment in the most gruesome neo-Senecan manner.

It is interesting to note that the first tragedy of romantic intrigue in England, Gismond of Salerne, borrows a similar story from Boccaccio,⁸ the one in which Tancred revenges himself on his daughter's secret love by having her lover murdered and his heart carried to her in a cup; she puts poison in it and drinks the blood. That the authors thought they were writing tragedy in the classical manner is suggested by their giving it a Senecan framework of choruses and a fury and a Senecan tone of moralizing rhetoric. Giraldi's Orbecche, enormously influential, is of the same type, a story of secret love and savage revenge appearing first in his Ecatommithi. If a renaissance dramatist was well enough read in the Greeks to know that violent deeds rarely appeared on the stage, and if he recalled Horace's prohibition, he could appeal in Seneca to Hercules' slaughter of his children or the piecing together of the mangled remains of Hippolytus. Whether Seneca's plays were written only for declamation or were actually produced is an unsettled academic question of no relevance here,⁹ since in any case renaissance authors found example for their own deeds of horror in his. Giraldi was shrewd enough to perceive that Aristotle had not actually prohibited the showing of violent scenes and he used this omission as authority for following modern taste.¹⁰ Horrible deeds, then, were a recognized component of tragedy and the shock of bloody spectacle taken as an equivalent to Aristotle's tragic wonder. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, though complicated by the theme of ambition and not based on a novella, is clearly in this same line of tragedy.¹¹ It is second to none in horror and perhaps seemed as “classical,” except in regard to time and place, as Orbecche or Gismond.

But the Italianate tragedy of intrigue often fell away from the traditional conception of tragedy. The ways in which it did so may be briefly examined. In the first place, historical truth was of less importance than in the tragedy of ambition with political figures as characters. The prejudice persisted, however, and it is probable that many dramatists borrowing the plots of novelle thought they were following true tales when they were not. Giraldi and Bandello both told theirs for true. Bandello, by means of references to places and famous people he had met and of considerable realistic detail, invested his with an air of great verisimilitude. In translating Bandello's stories, Belleforest praised them especially for “la verité de l'histoire.” Some few, of course, were based on fact, the story of the Duchess of Malfi, for instance. The interesting thing is that a story like this is indistinguishable from one that is pretty certainly fiction, like that of Romeo and Julietta. The central story of Bianca Capella in Women Beware Women is grounded in historical fact; the subplot is from a tale that makes the claim of truth—Alexander Hart's True History of the Tragic Loves of Hippolito and Isabella, Neapolitans. Middleton perhaps thought he was also using a true tale for The Changeling, borrowed from the story of Alsemero and Beatrice-Joanna in John Reynolds' The Triumph of God's Revenge against Murder (1621).¹² Perhaps indeed he was, for the source of Reynolds' story is not known. How can we tell if Giraldi's story of the Moor who at the instigation of his ensign murdered his Venetian wife Disdemona is true or not? If a fictional story can pass for true, then the inhibition against inventing plots for tragedy is removed. Later plays do, indeed, contain more fictional plots than earlier ones. Clearly, standards of verisimilitude are less exacting in the requirement of historical truth for tales of love than for tales of princely ambition.

The second way in which Italianate tragedy modified the traditional conception was in sometimes having heroes of lower rank. When the tragic irony is not centered, as in the tragedy of ambition, in the distance of a man's fall, his rank ceases to be of quite so much importance. Bianca Capella in Women Beware Women is a merchant's wife; for this reason Professor Adams treats the play as a domestic tragedy.¹³ But Bianca's love affair is with Francesco de' Medici, Duke of Florence, and the management and tone of the play put it with other Italianate intrigue plays, e.g., The White Devil, where the same duke figures. It is not different in any essential particular of setting or handling of plot from The Changeling, where the characters are hardly noble either, but at least military and so outside the range of domestic tragedy. Similar observations about rank and tone might be made of Ford's 'Tis Pity. I should treat it as somewhat debased romantic tragedy, whereas Mr. Adams treats it as decadent domestic tragedy.¹⁴ Since these classes are in any case imposed after the fact, there is no reason to quarrel; it all depends from which end one starts. The difference of opinion is testimony to the point I am making, namely that in tragedies of romantic intrigue rank is of less crucial significance than in tragedies of power.

Most important of all is the movement towards the happy ending. An intermediate stage (not necessarily so in time, but so in logic) is the tragedy with the double ending that Aristotle deplores, punishment for the bad, reward for the good. Giraldi justifies it as being pleasing to the taste of his own day.¹⁵ He tries it in at least two of his plays, Altile and Selene; they are still tragedies because they deal with the lamentable affairs of illustrious persons. In Epitia and several other “tragedies” he carries the process a step further and has the evil-doers forgiven; this is possible since no actual crime has been committed. In Epitia as in Measure for Measure, the heroine's brother, whom the perjured governor has ordered executed, turns out to be not dead after all; the heroine is so overjoyed to find him alive that she pleads for the villain's life and they all live happily ever after. This is instructive. We are in the region where tragedy and comedy are cut out of the same cloth. The major plot of Much Ado, for instance, is from a story of Bandello's in which malicious plotting on the part of a rival for the heroine's hand and of his evil accomplice is made to produce only mishap, not irrevocable criminal action, and therefore does not preclude a happy outcome.¹⁶ Romantic plots which put a premium on the strangeness and complication of event for its own sake naturally tend towards this kind of solution. This type of plot had always been known and popular in England, but in the later years of Elizabeth's reign it yielded somewhat to more sharply distinguished tragedy and comedy. However, very early in James's reign, the current set strongly in the direction of tragicomedy.

But when the Italianate tragedy of intrigue is still tragedy, how does it differ in essential tragic feeling from the rise-and-fall tragedy of ambition? In the early tragedies of romantic intrigue, interests appropriate to the murder mystery—plentiful action, suspense leading up to a deed of horror, shocking crime—are apt to take the place of any deeper questioning about man's destiny. The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, Tancred and Gismund, The Jew of Malta, Titus Andronicus, and other Elizabethan tragedies of this sort strike us as primarily lively thrillers, although we sometimes catch glimpses of a deeper purpose, as in the pathos of the distraught Hieronimo or in the mordancy of Barabas. The exciting force in this kind of plot is frequently love or jealous hatred, mixed or not with political intrigue. Bandello's 214 tales contain sixty-six tales of adultery and kindred themes (excluding those involving the clergy) and nineteen tales of the tribulations of love ending unhappily. The largest class in Giraldi's collection is likewise illicit love—twenty-eight out of 110.¹⁷ Here, of course, in the contemplation of the unhappiness that comes upon men and women in their relations with each other, is a chance to deepen tragic feeling, and this was done in the great Jacobean plays. The considerable interest in psychological studies around the turn of the century, especially in pathological mental states, gave dramatists the means of rendering human behavior more richly and subtly. Another line of interest growing strong at the same time, for social and literary reasons that I need not develop here, was the interest in satire; it helped set a tone in the treatment of problems of sex. Moreover, in their French and English versions, the source stories had to be quarried out from layers of moralizing on sin, especially on adultery. The interests in psychology and in satire joined hands in the favorite malcontent type, with his bitter wit exposing all the ugliness of the society around him. The result, at its best, of this amalgam of psychology, satire, and moral gloom is a tragedy of intensely conceived characters—not always attractive and often unbalanced emotionally—caught in an evil world of adultery, incest, and murder.

How are we to take tragedy like this? A tragic flaw will hardly describe what is wrong with heroes and heroines like Vittoria or Evadne or Bianca Capella, not to mention the Insatiate Countess, Brachiano, or Vindici. Nor is the response indicated so often one of pity and fear as of fascination or disgust or both together.¹⁸ These attitudes are most strongly felt in Marston, Tourneur, and Webster, though in Webster with much qualification. Morbid fascination and disgust find their extreme expression in The Revenger's Tragedy. (If the tone of disgust at sexual licence is as strong in Hamlet as in The Revenger's Tragedy, it is less crude, less morbid, not exclusive of pity.) Though Middleton's world is as ugly as Marston's or Tourneur's, he has more emotional detachment than they in regarding it. In Beaumont and Fletcher plentiful statement of attitude takes the place of actual feeling about it. Ford has lost the disgust, but kept the fascination. As with much of the tragedy of power, it is evident that Aristotelian canons, either of the nature of the tragic hero, or of the emotions appropriate to tragedy, do not generally apply. Shakespeare in Othello, in the nobility of his hero, and in the catharsis of emotion he effects, is rather the exception than the rule. It is true that we feel a compelling admiration for the boldness and vitality of many of the principal characters in these plays—people like Beatrice Joanna, Evadne, Flamineo, and De Flores—but we should find it hard, I think, to pity many of them; nor are we usually asked to. The Duchess of Malfi, who has goodness and greatness in her as well as intensity, is a significant non-Shakespearean exception, and perhaps Vittoria is, too, in a different way.

Webster, though he is in this line of tragedy, is more complicated and harder to define than the others. His dark world is lit by a splendor that evokes something more than morbid fascination and disgust. Even creatures like Brachiano, Lodovico, and Flamineo shine in darkness. However wicked they may be, there is defiance and a kind of glory in the courage with which they meet death. In this respect Vittoria is akin to the Duchess. If the Duchess is Duchess of Malfi still, Vittoria in her death will not shed one base tear. There is something here, in a different realm of action, like the defiant courage of Chapman's heroes. Simple vitality asserts itself in a world that is doomed. The Duchess of Malfi cries out in justified protest against Ferdinand's jealously revengeful and diseased “honor,” which she has supposedly violated by her clandestine marriage:

                                                                      Why might not I marry?
I have not gone about in this to create
Any new world, or custom.
.....                                                                      Why should only I
Of all the other princes of the world
Be cased up, like a holy relic? I have youth
And a little beauty.(19)

But Vittoria's defense, in so far as she deigns to make any answer to the charges against her of adultery and of complicity in murder, is akin to the Duchess':

Sum up my faults, I pray, and you shall find
That beauty and gay clothes, a merry heart,
And a good stomach to a feast are all,
All the poor crimes that you can charge me with.(20)

If the world is doomed, then such vitality and such courage must evoke pity, a pity that transcends the lines of good and evil. In Webster, there is a hint, afar off, that all the sons of men are to be pitied. In the tragic wonder he evokes, Webster, with Shakespeare, comes closer than his contemporaries to Aristotelian tragedy; but in his moral and philosophical implications he is far more Stoical than Aristotelian.

Different as these Jacobeans may be in their separate emphases, there is one way in which they can be viewed as part of a common tradition. In their tragedies, Death and the Devil are common symbols. As in the tragedy of power a little grave is the end man's glory comes to, so in the tragedy of sex the foulness of the skeleton is the end of woman's beauty. The ironic contrast is not to power, as in the other tragedy, but to the life of the senses, and, occasionally, to a beauty and love beyond that level. But in any case death opposes a different form of vitality from the energy of ambition. Death is present in the midst of life, and the Devil has taken over the world. There is a significant difference here, however, from the Christian tradition. The symbol opposed to Death in the morality plays (the Virtues in some form, or a Good Angel) and by whose aid man might save himself, has largely disappeared. Man, therefore, in these plays lives “in what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness.”²¹ If there is to be any assertion of value in such a world, it can only be endurance in life and courage in confronting death. Antony, Cleopatra, Clermont, and Cato in courageous death remove themselves beyond the caprice of Fortune:

                                                                                                              … and it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change.

As Clermont puts it:

Since I could skill of man, I never liv'd
To please men worldly, and shall I in death,
Respect their pleasures, making such a jar
Betwixt my death and life, when death should make
The consort sweetest, th'end being proof and crown
To all the skill and worth we truly own?

He will follow his admired master, the Guise:

                                                            Now, then, as a ship
Touching at strange and far-removed shores,
Her men ashore go, for their several ends,
Fresh water, victuals, precious stones, and pearl,
All yet intentive (when the master calls,
The ship to put off ready) to leave all
Their greediest labours, lest they there be left
To thieves or beasts, or be the country's slaves:
So, now my master calls, my ship, my venture,
All in one bottom put, all quite put off,
All gone under sail, and I left negligent,
To all the horrors of the vicious time,
The far-remov'd shores to all virtuous aims,
None favouring goodness, none but he respecting
Piety or manhood—shall I here survive,
Not cast me after him into the sea,
Rather than here live, ready every hour
To feed thieves, beasts, and be the slave of power?
I come, my lord! Clermont, thy creature, comes.(22)

Cato by his suicide conquers conquering Caesar. Yet if the world is not just one of unhappy circumstance, but one of positive evil, actually the Devil's world, without chance of redemption, then there is hardly even a victory in stoical courage. The noble Pompey, treacherously caught and stabbed, questions eternal justice:

See, heavens, your sufferings! Is my country's love,
The justice of an empire, piety,
Worth this end in their leader? Last yet, life,
And bring the gods off fairer: after this
Who will adore or serve the deities?(23)

He hides his face in his robe and submits to his assassins. Middleton's De Flores, in a Christian setting, takes his mistress boldly to Hell.

Make haste, Joanna, by that token to thee [i.e., the wound he had given her],
Canst not forget, so lately put in mind;
I would not go to leave thee far behind.

Alsemero has prepared the way with a grim image:

                                                                                                              … rehearse again
Your scene of lust, that you may be perfect
When you shall come to act it to the black audience,
Where howls and gnashings shall be music to you.
Clip your adulteress freely, 'tis the pilot
Will guide you to the mare mortuum,
Where you shall sink to bottoms fathomless.(24)

And Webster's Bosola dies in a mist, on a voyage of doom.

Shakespeare uses the same symbols of Death, the Devil, and Hell in Othello, and Othello makes a stoical speech of courage in the face of death. But the judgment on himself is without defiance. There is a note of humility in Othello scarcely to be found elsewhere in these plays, unless it is in Bosola. Above all, the play is different in effect from most of the others because in it there is goodness and redemption as well as ruin and death.

To summarize the ironic implications of these two major lines of tragedy we have been considering: The special irony in the tragedy of ambition, where it is fully realized, is in the final helplessness of man, in spite of his godlike aspirations for power, before an inexorable universe. The special irony in the tragedy of sex is in man's betrayal by his passions to a world of evil. A supreme realization of this irony is in Othello, where a man rich in all that we most admire in character—emotional depth, integrity, idealism, frankness, and generosity—is led by his very largeness into self-betrayal by the basest of passions, and led by a man who is the epitome of meanness, cynicism, malice, and intelligence directed toward evil ends. A more characteristic realization of the irony, however, is perhaps found in other Jacobeans, where men less good and great are betrayed by vanity or lust or simply a desire for life, as with the Duchess of Malfi, to a world in which death is supreme.

Notes

1. See F. T. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Princeton Univ. Press, 1940), passim. The importance of revenge for plot-building is discussed in Ch. XI, pp. 306-8, below. For references to Senecanism, see Ch. I, n. 25.

2. [Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy, 1936], pp. 391 ff.

3. Gismond of Salerne extant only in MSS (ed. Cunliffe, EECT); Tancred and Gismond, pr. 1591-92 (Malone Soc., 1914).

4. For an excellent brief account of the Italian novella and its spread, see “Novella,” sections by Ferdinando Neri and by Salvatore Rosati, in Enciclopedia italiana; also article on Bandello by Letterio di Francia. For influence of novelle in England, consult John Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction, new ed., revised by Henry Wilson (London, 1896), esp. Chs. VII, VIII; Emil Köppel, “Studien zur Geschichte der italienischen Novelle in der englischen Litteratur des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Quellen und Forschungen (Strassburg, 1892), H. 70; Adèle Ott, Die italienische Novelle im englischen Drama von 1600 bis zur Restauration (Zürich, 1904); Arundell Esdaile, A List of English Tales and Prose Romances printed before 1740 (London: For the Bibliographical Society, 1912); Mary Augusta Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (Boston and New York, 1916), secs. I, IV, XII—detailed information both on contents of collections and on analogues in drama; Ernest A. Baker, History of the English Novel (London, 1929), Vol. II; René Pruvost, Matteo Bandello and Elizabethan Fiction (Paris, 1937).

5. Dependence on Giraldi's prose tale in Ecatommithi (VIII. v) is hesitatingly recognized by editors; actually there are more significant resemblances to Giraldi's play Epitia, which editors dismiss, perhaps following Julius L. Klein (Geschichte des Dramas, Leipzig, 1865-76, IV, 354-55). Klein notes as fortuitous Shakespeare's use of the name “Angelo” (not in either of Whetstone's versions or in the novella) and the use of “Angela” in Epitia for the name of the sister of Juriste (Shakespeare's Angelo). He did not notice other significant agreements between Epitia and Measure for Measure where the other sources differ. …

6. On the subject of the influence of Italian drama on English renaissance drama, see R. Warwick Bond, Introduction to Early Plays from the Italian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911); Winifred Smith, The Commedia dell'Arte (Columbia Univ. Press, 1912), esp. Ch. VI, App. B, and Bibliography; Scott, Eliz. Transl. from the Italian, secs. III, XII; Kathleen M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), Vol. II, Ch. VI, Bibliography and Appendices. The bibliography of the subject is extensive; the older German scholarship (Klein, Creizenach, Köppel, etc.—see bibliographies in Shakespeare Jahrbuch) should not be neglected. …

7. Decameron, IV. ix; De Nores, Poetica, I. x (pp. 48^v ff.).

8. Decameron, IV, i.

9. See [Philip Whaley Harsh, A Handbook of Classical Drama, 1944], pp. 404-5.

10. Giraldi, Com. e trag., pp. 222-24; prologue to Orbecche (Tragedie, and in LC, p. 245). On the importance of Orbecche for renaissance Senecanism, see Cunliffe, Introduction to [Early English Classical Tragedies], pp. xxx ff.

11. … On the sources of Titus Andronicus see H. de W. Fuller, “The Sources of Titus Andronicus,” PMLA, XVI (1901), 1-65; R. A. Law, “The Roman Background of Titus Andronicus,” SP, XL (April, 1943), 145-53.

12. Baskervill (“Some Evidence for Early Romantic Plays in England,” MP, XIV, 488) thinks the story is from an old play rather than from the novella; he says the same story is in the French miracle de Notre Dame “La Femme du roi de Portugal,” and repeated in Louvet's first miracle, 1536.

13. Henry Hitch Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy (Columbia Univ. Press, 1943), pp. 168-69.

14. Ibid., pp. 177-83. The story is from Rosset, Histoires tragiques, No. 5.

15. Com. e trag., pp. 219-25. …

16. Novelle, I. xxii. …

17. For these figures I am indebted to D. P. Rotunda, “A Tabulation of Early Italian Tales,” in Univ. of California Publ. in Mod. Philology, Vol. XIV, No. 4 (1930). Unfortunately he does not break down his figures for tales of illicit love into comic and tragic treatment.

18. For an interesting discussion of the tragedy of evil see Henry W. Wells, Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), Ch. II.

19. The Duchess of Malfi, III. ii. 127-29, 160-63 (Works, ed. F. L. Lucas, London, 1927).

20. The White Devil, III. ii. 215-18 (ed. Lucas).

21. The Duchess of Malfi, V. v. 125-26. Cf. Lennard's Charron, I. xxxv (p. 108): “Our present life is but the entrance and end of a Tragedy, a perpetual issue of errours, a web of unhappy adventures, a pursuit of divers miseries inchained together on all sides; there is nothing but evil that it distilleth, that it prepareth; one evil drives forward another evil, as one wave another; torment is ever present, and the shadow of what is good deceiveth us; blindness and want of sense possesseth the beginning of our life, the middle is ever in pain and travel [i.e., travail], the end in sorrow; and beginning, middle, and end in errour.”

22. The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, V. v. 162-93 (The Tragedies, ed. Parrott).

23. Caesar and Pompey, V. i. 259-63.

24. The Changeling, V. iii. 178-80, 115-21 (ed. Bullen).

Abbreviations

Included in the following list are only those most commonly used abbreviations that may not be self-evident. The first reference to a book cited in the notes is always given in full, and may be located from the index. Shortened titles, when they are used in later references, are nearly always identified by the author's name, either in the text or in the note; the only exceptions are such familiar reference books as Chambers' Elizabethan Stage (Eliz. Stage). References to learned journals follow the standard style in the annual bibliographies in Studies in Philology and in Publications of the Modern Language Association.

BCL, Biblioteca classica latina.

Com. e trag., Delle comedie, e delle tragedie in G. B. Giraldi Cinthio's Discorso. … intorno al comporre de i romanzi, delle comedie, e delle tragedie. Com. graec. frag., Comicorum graecorum fragmenta, edited by Georgius Kaibel.

ECE, Elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by G. Gregory Smith.

EECT, Early English Classical Tragedies, edited by John W. Cunliffe.

LC, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, edited by Allan Gilbert.

Rom., De i romanzi in G. B. Giraldi Cinthio's Discorso (see Com. e trag., above).